@feld_thoughts

Today a group of us launched Founded Colorado.

Eleni Angelides is the Executive Director. She spent nearly eight years in Governor Polis’s office, most recently as Legislative Director, where she ran the Governor’s agenda at the Capitol. She worked on housing, land use, tax policy, RTD reform, and the allocation of more than a billion dollars in COVID recovery funds.

Founded Colorado is an advocate for Colorado’s innovative companies - the ones “founded here, growing here, and working with lawmakers and regulators to keep Colorado a place where great companies start and stay.” If your company is based in Colorado, we are your home team.

This started with SB 24-205, Colorado’s first AI law. The legislature passed it in May 2024. Governor Polis signed it “with reservations,” and within a month he, the Attorney General, and the bill’s sponsor were promising to revise it. SB 24-205 was ill-fated, poorly drafted, and idiotic. It went straight to broad restrictions on how companies use AI without first figuring out what harm it was trying to prevent or how anyone would measure it.

Over the next two years, a bunch of Colorado companies, consumer advocates, the tech industry, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and lawmakers worked through a process to improve the law. The result was SB 26-189, which gives Coloradans the right to know when AI is shaping decisions about them and gives companies clear, workable rules. It passed with broad bipartisan support.

During this process, several of us realized that there wasn’t a policy or advocacy group in Colorado focused only on companies based in Colorado. Plenty of organizations show up at the Capitol. None of them were there specifically, and only, for the companies that started here, or moved their headquarters here, and want to keep building their companies here.

Rather than whining about it, we created Founded Colorado. The founding board is Chris Erickson (Board President) and Adam Burrows from Range Ventures, Bryan Leach (Ibotta), Bijal Shah (Guild), Kent Thiry (formerly DaVita), Eleni Angelides (our Executive Director), and me.

Our mission is straightforward. We make sure Colorado companies are at the table when policy is shaped. We bring real operating experience to proposed laws and to the rules that put them into practice, so they protect Coloradans and work for the Colorado companies that have to comply. We want to be the place lawmakers and partners call when they want a straight answer about how a new idea will play out. Our constituency is all companies based in Colorado.

If you are a founder or leader of a Colorado-based company and want to join, email me or reach out through Founded Colorado.

Come join the home team.

That Wanaka Tree. Photo by John Thomas on Unsplash.

I’ve fallen in love with New Zealand.

On Friday, October 16, I’ll be joining a group of New Zealand investors, fund managers, bankers, and tax and immigration advisors who are coming to Boulder for an Active Investor Plus roadshow lunch from noon to 2:30. Icehouse Ventures, Invest New Zealand, ASB Bank, Private Capital Group, and several others will talk about the program, where the investment opportunities are, and what it’s actually like to invest in and live in New Zealand.

Amy and I spent six weeks there and in Australia for my 60th birthday, and we head back later this month for a while. Since my work life is completely remote now, we are mostly just embracing our inner hermits and chasing the sun. But along the way, I’ve invested in ten New Zealand early stage venture funds (and ten, going on eleven, in Australia) and, when asked, have tried to be helpful to the broader New Zealand startup community.

The amount of overlap between Colorado and New Zealand surprises a lot of people. Both places are about 104,000 square miles. Each has a population between 5 and 6 million. Both are fucking beautiful places with enormous amounts of farmland and unpopulated space.

But the unexpected story for many is the business overlap.

Over 30 New Zealand companies have a presence in Colorado, employing 400-500 people, mostly in tech and aerospace. Xero moved its Americas HQ from San Francisco to Denver in 2017. Halter, which makes virtual fencing for cattle, is headquartered in Boulder and raised $220 million at a $2 billion valuation in March. Rocket Lab has been in Littleton since 2021. Auror, Cin7, Figured, Parkable, TracPlus, and others followed.

The government plumbing exists too. Denver and Auckland signed a City2City agreement at Denver Startup Week in 2024, and Auckland ran its first Startup Week a year later, modeled on Denver’s. In April 2025, Governor Polis and Judith Collins signed a Memorandum of Cooperation covering aerospace, quantum, geothermal, and entrepreneurship. It’s New Zealand’s second agreement with a US state (California is the other one).

New Zealand was the sixth largest source of foreign direct investment into Colorado in 2023.

The only thing missing is a nonstop flight between Denver and Auckland. Someday. Maybe. Hint hint airlines.

New Zealand overhauled the Active Investor Plus visa in April 2025. Since then, there have been almost 1,000 applications. Americans are the largest group at 32%, and NZ$2.88 billion has already been deployed into the New Zealand economy, mostly into venture capital, private credit, and private equity.

This is a two-way pipe. Americans on AIP visas back New Zealand companies, and those companies need a US home. I want them landing in Colorado.

If you’re curious about the visa, investing in New Zealand, or about building a bigger bridge between Colorado and New Zealand, join us. It’s a private event and requires host approval, so request an invite here.

Two weeks ago, Amodei (Anthropic) published We Must Pace the Frontier, and Altman (OpenAI), Hassabis (Google), and Musk (SpaceXAIZWQ5r) all agreed. But Huang (Nvidia) didn’t. I wonder what Zaphod Beeblebrox thinks.

Last week, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 - its first release since the pacing essay - and a few hours later OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna into a price war under Astra.

Pacing the frontier is a serious idea that no one seems to be taking seriously. Or is it? Or are they?

Then over the weekend I saw another round of articles about the agents escaping. And something nonsensical about the global AI competition between China and the US. Thankfully I don’t read X anymore so I have no idea what the bloviating there was this weekend, although I’m sure I’ll get something entertaining at the end of the day today on the Techmeme email newsletter.

The OpenAI write-up on the DNS seemed like it was no big deal, nothing to see here, straightforward ops failure. An RL agent in a training sandbox figured out that DNS wasn’t filtered the way HTTP was, and used that gap to query an external chatbot. In plain English, the sandbox had a hole. Monitoring caught it. Someone eventually killed the run.

That has never happened before in the history of computing. Oh wait, something in that category happens every day. That’s why CrowdStrike is worth $250 billion.

The DseWiki story is older. Between May and June, agents used an abandoned German programming wiki as a coordination board - sharing answers, swapping workarounds, and parking notes where other runs could find them.

If you’re hunting for a real life example of one of my favorite sci-fi “hideout” tropes, you found it. But the agents weren’t building a cabin in the woods to hide from humans. They were optimizing for the task they were given, using a public wiki that nobody was paying attention to.

None of this sounds like Skynet. Yet. Or does it?

Are we slowing down? Are we speeding up? Or is everyone just gaslighting everyone about everything?

I love Labor Day weekend. It’s the “back to school” moment of the year for me. When I was a kid growing up in Dallas, we didn’t go back to school until after Labor Day, so that was the weekend that summer ended and fall began. I wrote ten years ago that Memorial Day and Labor Day are the bookends of summer. What’s different now is that I’m 60, closing in on 61, and lately I’ve been thinking a lot more about what I actually care about. Amy texted me this list yesterday. The real luxuries in life: - Time - Health - A quiet mind - Slow mornings - Ability to travel - Rest without guilt - A good night’s sleep - Calm and “boring” days - Meaningful conversations - Home-cooked meals - People you love - People who love you back It’s a wonderful list. Enjoy the long weekend.